The Dr. Psycho Paradox

You’re eating apples with your friend Dr. Psychic Psycho, a talented biochemist who fancies himself a clairvoyant and has made many accurate oddball predictions.

“I have interesting news for you,” he says. “You must seriously consider taking this pill. As you know (since we have recently determined it together), it contains substance X, which (as you also know — but consult this pharmacopeia if in doubt) is fatally poisonous by itself, while nevertheless furnishing unfailing antidote to poison Z — though it does have some minorly unpleasant side effects. Now the apple I gave to you, which you have just finished eating, was poisoned by me with Z — or not — in line with my prediction as to your taking or not taking the antidote pill. Benign old me, of course, only poisoned the apple if I foresaw that you were indeed going to take the antidote. And not to worry — I’m a very good predictor.”

He rushes off. What should you do?

(By University of Pittsburgh philosopher Nicholas Rescher.)

| Science & Math

Next!

Modern times have come to China — religious teachers must now fill out a government application before they can be reincarnated.

The decree, passed in 2007, requires that applications be submitted to four different government bodies. “The selection of reincarnates must preserve national unity and solidarity of all ethnic groups, and the selection process cannot be influenced by any group or individual from outside the country.”

“Work out your own salvation,” said the Buddha. “Do not depend on others.”

| Religion · Society

Medical Brief

The story about Dr. Abernethy and his lady patient is a classic. He was a man of few words, and the lady knew it. Being shown into his private office, she bared her arm and said simply, ‘Burn.’

‘A poultice,’ said the doctor.

Next day she called again, showed her arm, and said, ‘Better.’

‘Continue the poultice.’

Some days elapsed before Abernethy saw her again. Then she said, ‘Well. Your fee?’

‘Nothing,’ said the doctor, bursting into unusual loquacity. ‘You are the most sensible woman I ever met in my life!’

— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

| Humor · Society

Stare Conditioning

In 1958, B.F. Skinner and Erich Fromm attended the same California symposium. Skinner found that Fromm “proved to have something to say about almost everything, but with little enlightenment,” and “when he began to argue that people were not pigeons, I decided that something had to be done”:

On a scrap of paper I wrote ‘Watch Fromm’s left hand. I am going to shape a chopping motion’ and passed it down the table to [Halleck Hoffman]. Fromm was sitting directly across from the table and speaking mainly to me. I turned my chair slightly so that I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He gesticulated a great deal as he talked, and whenever his left hand came up, I looked straight at him. If he brought the hand down, I nodded and smiled. Within five minutes he was chopping the air so vigorously that his wristwatch kept slipping out over his hand.

“William Lederer had seen my note, and he whispered to Halleck. The note came back with an addendum: ‘Let’s see you extinguish it.’ I stopped looking directly across the table, but the chopping went on for a long time. It was an unfair trick, but Fromm had angered me — first with his unsupported generalizations about human behavior and then with the implication that nothing better could be done if ‘people were regarded as pigeons.'”

(From Skinner’s 1983 memoir A Matter of Consequences.)

| Science & Math

Poetry Piecemeal

Lexicographer Wilfred Funk declared these the 10 most beautiful words in English:

  • chimes
  • dawn
  • golden
  • hush
  • lullaby
  • luminous
  • melody
  • mist
  • murmuring
  • tranquil

Playwright Edward Sheldon declared these the ugliest:

  • funeral parlor
  • galluses
  • housewife
  • intelligentsia

Charles V said, “We should speak Spanish with the gods, Italian with our lover, French with our friend, German with soldiers, English with geese, Hungarian with horses, and Bohemian with the devil.”

See Euphony.

| Language

Waste Paper

John Warburton (1682–1759) collected drama manuscripts during a fruitful period in English literature. Unfortunately, he’s remembered chiefly for his carelessness — he left a pile of 50 manuscripts in his kitchen and returned months later to find that his cook had destroyed nearly all of them in lighting fires and lining pie pans.

Among the losses were plays by Massinger, Ford, Dekker, Greene, Davenant, Tourneur, Rowley, Chapman, Glapthorne, and Middleton — and three by William Shakespeare.

See A Poor Review and A Loss for Words.

| Literature

Cute or Bust

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=jk1aAAAAEBAJ&dq=goetze+dimples

Martin Goetze’s 1896 “device for producing dimples,” left, was uncomfortably similar to a hand drill — an ivory knob was placed on the site and a rotating cylinder made the surrounding skin “malleable.”

Evangeline Gilbert’s improvement, right, patented in 1926, was essentially a headpiece that drove depressions into the cheeks. “The length of time on this pressure will vary with different persons, but it has been found that, if the appliance be used during the night, dimples will be present during the next day.”

Baltasar Gracian wrote, “Beauty and folly are generally companions.”

| Technology

Literary Stature

http://books.google.com/books?id=TbUvAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Comparative popularity of British novelists at the end of the 19th century, from Strand, August 1906. The giant is Dickens, followed by Thackeray and the now largely forgotten Hall Caine. Lesser mortals, left to right, are Thomas Hardy, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Marie Corelli, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Augusta Ward, J.M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Stanley Weyman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, George Meredith, Anthony Trollope, Charles Kingsley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Israel Zangwill, Charles Reade, and E.F. Benson.

“It should be pointed out that this diagram does not pretend to apportion the degree of contemporary literary reputations. It only shows what kind of fiction has been most read by the masses during the past twenty years.”

| Literature